rtab-map feature

Hi, I'm trying to learn about Rtab-map. It kind of confuses, when I read the package and examples. The package says it does mapping, and example (tutorial) says it can also do navigation, but the launch file (Rtabmap-turtlebot tutorial say it use turtlebot move_base for navigation). Please correct me if I misread something.

So I want to ask if there is a complete list of Rtab-map feature & tools? So I'm not getting confused of what can it do, and what can't it do.

Asked by nnhh on 2019-08-15 01:24:33 UTC

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Answers

RTAB-Map is a SLAM approach. When navigation is mentioned, move_base is always used under the hood. RTAB-Map can do planning in its graph (i.e., topological planning) but still rely on move_base (i.e., metrical planning) to make the robot move and avoid dynamic obstacles. The SLAM+planning capability is described in this paper:

M. Labbé and F. Michaud, “Long-term online multi-session graph-based SPLAM with memory management,” in Autonomous Robots, vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 1133-1150, 2018.

For SLAM alone, rtabmap can do visual and lidar SLAM. See this paper focusing only on the SLAM part:

M. Labbé and F. Michaud, “RTAB-Map as an Open-Source Lidar and Visual SLAM Library for Large-Scale and Long-Term Online Operation,” in Journal of Field Robotics, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 416–446, 2019.

EDIT: A list of ros nodes are described on rtabmap_ros page, along with some demos including rosbags. Some ROS tutorials are here. For tools, the DatabaseViewer may be the most useful tool to analyse the map.

Asked by matlabbe on 2019-08-17 10:14:11 UTC